If you’re a Windows user and are always intrigued by the Linux world, then many times you might have wondered about switching to the light side. As easy as it sounds, and easy as it really is, there is a certain sort of paranoia Windows users have before trying out anything Linux-related. This inhibition can be partly attributed to Microsoft’s long-standing domination and partly to the bad reputation Linux has with the so-called ‘normal’ users.

Over a year ago I wrote a post complaining that you where unable to complete the “free application for federal student aide” from an FOSS operating system without first tricking the government’s website into thinking you are running Windows.

Linux and FOSS are key players in science and research, and together they power the biggest research projects in the world. Here are four projects that show four different ways Linux is used in large-scale research.

Graphics Stack

Ubuntu 12.04, Compiz 0.9.8 and Unity 5.12 are fantastic. My colleagues, Daniel and Alan and I have invested a significant amount into refactoring the compiz code so that we can split it up and test it, writing test coverage for most of the fixes that are going in, improving performance through profile guided optimization and fixing some of the most important architectural issues within compiz. We’ve streamlined the development process by merging together a large number of branches into one source repository, moved to test-driven-development practices with a stringent review process.

This has made Ubuntu 12.04 fantastic. Fantastic it seems, unless you are using the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver.

The Linux 3.5 kernel is capable of delivering some massive performance gains for some of the more recent generations of ATI/AMD Radeon graphics processors. Here’s some benchmarks showing the hefty performance gains found when using the latest kernel that is still being developed.

Applications

Flowblade is a multitrack non-linear video editor for Linux designed to “provide a fast, precise and as-simple-as-possible editing experience”. The application can be used to join or cut videos, create movies from video clips, audio clips and images, add filters and more.

One of the many strengths of Linux is its good range of open source software for artists, photographers, animators, and designers. With inexpensive hardware, free software, and a modicum of talent and inspiration, anyone can create professional-looking computer graphics.

Games

It was at the end of January that Michael Simms, the founder and original CEO of Linux Game Publishing had stepped down after suffering burn out and not much coming out of the company in recent years. Taking over Linux Game Publishing was Clive Crous. Four months ago from yesterday, Clive blogged about the new work and his “great plans for Linux Game Publishing.”

This week from the E3 Expo there’s been new details to emerge about Unreal Engine 4 as the latest game engine that’s in development by Epic Games. But will there be any native UE4 Linux games to come or will it face a similar fate to Unreal Engine 3 on Linux?

Yes, you got it! Other 3 great games have been added to The Humble Indie Bundle V!
IMHO, this makes this bundle the best bundle ever created, because now, if you beat the average price (about $8), you have 8 games!!!

The blog post can be found at blogs.valvesoftware.com where Abrash goes into detail about becoming involved with computer programming at university, etc.

As far as why this blog post is being mentioned on Phoronix: Valve is still in need of more high-quality Linux talent. Just this week from one of the Valve Linux developers I hear again, “Got a ton of work to do…Need more good people. :)”

Desktop Environments

I’ve been having a case of writer’s blockage lately – a creative constipation if you will. Over the past week I drafted about a dozen articles, and ended up hating all of them so much I couldn’t bring myself to finish typing them up. So in lieu of actual content lets do an audience participation thing again, while I go and find my creative muses again.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

GNOME Desktop

The GNOME project has released the latest development snapshot in their unstable 3.5 branch; the 3.5 branch will eventually become the basis for the stable GNOME 3.6 branch. GNOME 3.5.2 includes a new font viewer application and gives the users a power off button in the user menu by default. This addresses one of the biggest criticisms of the GNOME 3 release, as users were previously only able to shut down their computers from the menu by holding down the Alt key to make the power off option visible.

I installed the antiX-base M12.0 pre-final version on a 2004-vintage Dell Dimension 3000 desktop that I acquired from my sister, and I put it in my Mother’s den, and configured it to automatically login to a JWM desktop with Rox icons, containing a Web browser and a terminal.

Gentoo Family

Red Hat Family

Open source software provider Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) released for general availability Red Hat CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management platform designed to enable enterprise customers to deploy and manage IaaS hybrid clouds, with the opportunity to provide computing resources to users “in a managed, governed and secure way.”

CentOS developer Johnny Hughes has detailed recent efforts by the project to improve the release timing of the distribution. The CentOS team of volunteers has created new workflows and has also secured funding for developers to work full time on the project, and says that these efforts have already paid off.

Fedora

I am preparing for a trip to Iceland this summer, and have been considering which computers to take along. First, why plural “computers”? Because if anything happens, whether it be lost/stolen/damaged baggage along the way, or equipment failure/malfunction while we are there, I don’t want to be without a netbook. We stay in touch, check routes, roads, conditions and weather, unload pictures from cameras, send postcards and much more that we would not want to do without. So I take two, and I make sure that one is in checked baggage and one is in a carry-on.

I wasn’t going to weigh in on this issue because it was really is not the huge, Chicken Little-esque matter some people — some people I once held in high esteem — are making it out to be. I’ve commented on this on social media outlets and in e-mail exchanges, and frankly I’m a little surprised at how this infinitessimally innocuous development has caused some in our happy little FOSS circle to become Harold Camping.

Actually, I’m going to let Brian Proffitt drive here, since he explains the whole Fedora/UEFI issue pretty well. In his blog, Brian points out that it is hardly an ideal situation, but it’s a trade-off. Not a very palatable one, but nonetheless a trade-off.

Debian Family

I’ve long been a fan of Debian-based Linux OSes in general, and Ubuntu in particular. However, my disaffection with Ubuntu’s new Unity desktop had left me yearning for a suitable alternative. Finally last week, I removed Ubuntu 11.10 from my primary desktop computer and substituted the Linux Mint project’s latest Debian implementation: LMDE 201204. What a breath of fresh air!

Derivatives

Canonical/Ubuntu

The arrival of Ubuntu Linux 12.04 LTS “Precise Pangolin” was a major event a few weeks ago, not least because it is a Long Term Support release and thus a good, stable choice for both business and individual users.

It’s quite easy these days to build a many-core compute cluster that is low-powered, running Linux, and performant-friendly. Here’s a small cluster build that’s begun at Phoronix and has twelve 1.2GHz cores while the total system power consumption under load is just about 30 Watts.

Flavours and Variants

Blackbuntu is a Ubuntu-based distro used for penetration testing and security auditing. Blackbuntu is designed to be used by students and practitioners who are interested in the field of information security.

We’re passionate about what we do and for our very first Mint device, we wanted something unique, something special and extraordinary. The mintBox is Mint in a box. It’s tiny, it’s silent, it’s extremely versatile and it comes packed with connectivity.

A source of BriefMobile has leaked some images of a new device from LG, headed to Sprint. The “Snapshot” (how appropriate), also known as the LG LS730, should be coming out in the last quarter of 2012. The device is a standard design, with a square body, physical home button, and – from what we can tell – metal bands along the sides.

Sub-notebooks/Tablets

The newly formed Open-Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) wants to take robotics development into the future as fast as possible, and says it will support the development, distribution, and adoption of open-source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.

While many software developers get paid to work on open source by their employer or volunteer their time for free to various FOSS projects, some end up deciding to quit their day jobs to work on free and open source software (FOSS) full time. That’s exactly what Bryan Lunduke and Patrick Verner are now doing and they’re both hoping that the respective communities for their projects will help to support their efforts financially.

Not long ago, after giving a speech about free software I was asked by an audience member whether the free software community had come up with free (as in freedom) gambling software. I answered “no”, and… I was wrong. A bit of research told me that there us such a platform: that’s Cubeia’s Firebase. Yes, it’s fully free software/open source, the real deal. I couldn’t resist: I asked its founder (and software engineer) for an interview. So, here we go!

Web Browsers

Mozilla

This week, Mozilla released new versions of Mozilla Thunderbird, its free and open source email application, for Windows, the Mac, and Linux. The new version 13 of Thunderbird offers some major improvements, most notably the ability to register personal email domains. Previously, if you wanted to have an email address such as Frank@geniuswork.com, Thunderbird couldn’t handle the task of personalizing the domain part of the address. Mozilla has solved the problem by working with hosting services Hover and Gandi.

SaaS

As demand for Big Data technologies grows, one technology has stood head and shoulders above all others – Apache Hadoop. Adding enterprise-class management and packaging up all the disparate parts of Hadoop is where Cloudera comes into play.

This week, Cloudera updated its core open source CDH 4 (Cloudera Distribution of Hadoop) and Cloudera Enterprise platforms. The new releases provide more security and scalability than prior releases, according to Cloudera.

Databases

In this tutorial we are going to review indexes. I never cease to be amazed at how many people do not know what indexes are or how to use them. An index is simply a data structure that provides a fast access path to rows in a table based on the values in one or more columns (the index key). This allows for fast search techniques to be used to find the values ,rather than having to scan the entire table row by row, which results in much faster data retrieval. This can be a big performance booster in your environment, lowering the amount of time it takes to run a SELECT query and get data back.

Funding

You’ve probably heard of this intriguing new crowd-funding service called Kickstarter, right? (If not, how are you getting this website from that cave of yours?). A lot of people are using it to fund all kinds of exciting new things, and it’s obviously useful option for free software projects. Properly used, it can allow us to close the gap against proprietary applications that still have more polish or exist in niches that require more capitalization. But the idea that it is somehow immoral to ask for money to work on free software has got to go!

Openness/Sharing

Nicholson, community outreach director for Open Invention Network and community manager for the MediaGoblin project, says movement in the opposite direction–toward decentralization–is necessary for a more open, safe, and competitive future. And in “We Are Legion: Decentralizing the Web,” a presentation she delivered today at SouthEast LinuxFest in Charlotte, NC, Nicholson explained how open source projects are at the forefront of attempts to realize this future.

“I’d like to see more people working on decentralized services,” Nicholson said.

Standards/Consortia

While the decade long debate in the European Union over the definition of “open standards” has been well-publicized, it may come as a surprise to some that EU member nations are required to utilize a second standards filter in public procurement as well.

That filter relates to whether a standard has been developed by a “formal” standard setting organization (SSO). In other words, by either an EU SSO, such as CEN/CENELEC or ETSI, or by one of the global “Big Is” (ISO, IEC or ITU). If it doesn’t, then it’s supposed to be off limits – until now.

That filter has roots in a sixty year standards-based quest to benefit European trade, both within the EU and internationally. Historically, this goal was met by seeking to develop EU-wide standards that member states would be required to adopt, thereby replacing the national standards they had long used to keep the goods of neighboring nations out of their own markets. At the same time, these standards would be designed to facilitate EU goods internationally.

Security

Finance

I am appalled by the dramatic change of regime in Hungary and what is referred to as the European debt crisis. These two episodes, while being themselves the outcome of a complex chain of events, reflect our inability, as citizens, as a culture and perhaps as humans to remember the lessons of the past.

In what finally seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel for many homeowners who were bushwhacked by the big banks during the 2008 financial meltdown, the federal government made its oversight presence known to some of America’s largest financial institutions on June 7. The U.S. government made two separate moves, which demonstrated a strong presence amongst financial services companies. First, the Federal Reserve laid the groundwork for a stricter set of capital regulations for financial institutions with assets of at least $500 million. Second, federal regulators served a handful of financial firms with subpoenas that cited potential violations of FHA rules.

In February, it was revealed that Goldman sold $142.4 billion in credit default swaps that would pay out in the event Greece, Ireland, Portugal or Spain defaulted on its debt. Goldman also purchased swaps on the same debt worth an estimated $147.3 billion in all, according to Bloomberg.

Blankfein’s comments echoed remarks he made at the end of his testimony at the Gupta trial earlier this week. Both the public and private sector are laying the groundwork for responses to defaults, Blankfein said Thursday, but stopped short of confirming outright that Goldman is preparing as well.

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The lunacy of the EPO with its patent maximalism will likely go unchecked (and uncorrected) if Battistelli gets his way and turns the EPO into another SIPO (Croatian in the human rights sense and Chinese in the quality sense)

Another long installment in a multi-part series about UPC at times of post-truth Battistelli-led EPO, which pays the media to repeat the lies and pretend that the UPC is inevitable so as to compel politicians to welcome it regardless of desirability and practicability

Implementing yet more of his terrible ideas and so-called 'reforms', Battistelli seems to be racing to the bottom of everything (patent quality, staff experience, labour rights, working conditions, access to justice etc.)

"Good for trolls" is a good way to sum up the Unitary Patent, which would give litigators plenty of business (defendants and plaintiffs, plus commissions on high claims of damages) if it ever became a reality

Microsoft's continued fascination with and participation in the effort to undermine Alice so as to make software patents, which the company uses to blackmail GNU/Linux vendors, widely acceptable and applicable again